Patience as the Rational Foundation ofSociotropic Voting

February 14, 2017

Abstract

Economic voting is one of the most important mechanisms on explaining votingbehavior and on establishing the democratic accountability. However, people tendto use perceived national economic condition on evaluating the incumbent, which isknown as sociotropic voting, instead of their pocketbook. Previous studies suggestboth altruism and self-interested future expectation may help explain this seeminglyirrational behavior, but empirical works have not yet found convincing evidence toprove or disprove the self-interested motivation. This article suggests that patiencemakes people discount less on the potential future influence of the current nationaleconomic change; if self-interest drives sociotropic voting, patient voters would bemore sociotropic. Consistent with the hypothesis, individual-level data from 2014Comparative Congressional Election Survey shows that patient voters rely more onthe perceived national economic change to evaluate the incumbent and make votechoice. Limited evidences on the linkage between impatience and pocketbook votingamong non-partisans, the null finding linking sociotropic voting and altruism, and thecountry-level correlations are also provided.

Keywords. Patience; Discount Factor; Economic Voting; Sociotropic Voting

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Introduction

”When you think economics, think elections; when you think elections, think

economics.” (Tufte, 1980, pp. 65)

”One of the characteristics of democratic times is that all men have a taste

for easy successes and immediate pleasures...men do not want to think beyond

tomorrow.” (De Tocqueville, 1972)

Economic voting is one of the most important mechanisms for explaining voting behavior

and the establishing accountability of the democratic system. Voters reward the incumbent

when they feel the times are good, and ask for the turnover when the times are bad. Abun-

dant researchers suggest significant relationship between economic performance and election

outcome around the world (e.g. Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Kayser, 2014).

Given the economic growth, not everyone can enjoy the fruit at the same time. Some

economic reform may improve the national economy and competitive strength of a country

in the long run, but tens of thousands of people may lose their job during the process. More

specifically, people may feel differently on the personal and national economic condition. For

example, in the 2012 ANES survey, 5.9% of respondents (226 in 3783) reported that their

family income got worse in the previous year while national economic went up, and 7.2% (274)

believed the national economy was declining but their family income raised. Thus, studies

on economic voting distinguish between ”pocketbook” and ”sociotropic” voting: pocketbook

voting is the choice that voter rewards incumbent in the election owing to the improvement

of personal economic condition, while sociotropic voting describes the behavior when voter

evaluates the incumbent based on national economic change. Generally speaking, macro and

micro-level data suggest that most voters in the U.S. are sociotropic ones (e.g. Kinder and

Kiewiet, 1981; Markus, 1988; MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson, 1992).

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But, why are voters sociotropic? The sociotropic orientation seems to contradict with

the Homo economicus assumption: self-interest. In the 2012 ANES, for instance, among

those who perceived that the national economy got better but personal one went down,

78.3% of them still voted for the incumbent. In contrast, only 28.1% of voters supported

the incumbent who observed the decline of the national economy and given the increase of

personal one in the previous years.

One possible explanation for the sociotropic voting is altruism (Kinder and Kiewiet,

1981; Edlin, Gelman and Kaplan, 2007; Kiewiet and Lewis-Beck, 2011). Voter evaluates

the incumbent basing on not her own condition, but the well-being of all Americans. Voter

supports the incumbent merely because he or she believed other people have a better life led

by this incumbent.

Apart from altruism, in the original piece Kinder and Kiewiet (1981) also suggest a

possible foundation of economic rationality behind the sociotropic voting: ...Prototypic so-

ciotropic voters may construe the incumbent administration’s handling of the economy as a

public good, and thus use the incumbent’s ability to promote (eventually) their own economic

welfare - and only incidentally that of fellow citizens as well. The sociotropic consideration

outweighs the pocketbook one because voters believe the growing national economy will

eventually trickle down to their pocket one day in the future. Taking the expected future

personal gain into consideration, self-interested voters support the well-performed incumbent

despite current pocketbook lose, as is reflected in the ANES data.

If Kinder and Kiewiet’s guess is right, there is one key determinant on constructing the

self-interest foundation of sociotropic voting: patience. A voter who observed good national

economy must be patient enough to wait until the trickle-down effect comes true one day

in the future. Similarly, a future-oriented voter can see the future negative influence on his

pocketbook from the current national economic decline. Therefore, patient voters are much

sensitive to the performance of the national economy because they take its future influence

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on his pocketbook into account; they are ”self-interested sociotropic” voters accordingly. In

contrast, if the voter discounts the future outcome a lot, he may care less about the potential

trickle-down economic gain. In this scenario, the national economic condition would be less

influential on impatient people’s vote choice.

The exploration on the patience may also help disentangle the altruistic and self-interest

factors behind sociotropic voting. After four decades of research on economic voting since

Kinder and Kiewiet (1981), Kiewiet and Lewis-Beck (2011) still warn the lack of empirical

evidence on distinguishing between the self-interest and public interest motivation. If there

is a positive correlation between individual patience and sociotropic voting, the evidence may

provide the foundation for the self-interest mechanism. If no evidence linking patience and

sociotropic voting is found, the self-interest hypothesis is less supported. The exploration in

this article cannot rule out the influence of altruism, but it may help explore the economic

rationality behind the sociotropic voting.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, I will selectively review

recent works on individual patience and human behavior, which is widely neglected in polit-

ical science granted its theoretical importance. Section 3 discusses the hypothetical linkages

between patience and sociotropic voting. Section 4 presents the individual-level empirical

examination using 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES hereafter) survey

data (n = 1000). Section 5 concludes the main findings and renders preliminary analysis on

the country-level data linking patience, economic performance, and party linkage strategy.

Patience as pivotal determinants of human behaviors

Before the discussion of patience and economic voting, one may ask: why are people

impatient? Why do people put more weight on the immediate outcome while discounts the

distant one? Actually, this question is firstly asked by political economists over one hundred

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and fifty years ago. Cited in Loewenstein and Elster (1992), both Senior (1836) and Jevons

(1871) argued that people should view the equal treatment of the present and future as

a behavioral norm. If the goal of a rational man is to maximize the accumulated utility

within the lifespan, it then seems irrational to consider the utility of a future event as less

important relative to the myopic alternative. In the case of sociotropic voting, a rational

voter should always consider the potential future influence of the current national economic

condition to his personal affair. There are two main theories to explain why people tend to

deviate from the norm of rationality: risk and future-self connectedness. Both of them cope

with recent findings on the relationship between patience and limited cognitive resource of

human beings.

The first explanation for impatience is the risk. Because the outcome of the far future

event has not happened yet and might change, risk-averse people would prefer the certainty,

which means the event occurs immediately. Moreover, if an individual dies unexpectedly

due to an accident or sickness, he/she can never receive the utility of the future outcome.

However, although many studies have found a robust correlation between risk and time

preference (e.g. Gafni and Torrance, 1984; Andersen et al., 2008), they remain two distinct

concepts. On the one hand, if the risk is in the future, whether people change the behavior

following the risk is, indeed, decided by discounting factor; farsighted people seek insurance

if the potential damage from the future risk is large, but will do nothing when either there is

no risk or the risk is huge but he discounts it totally. On the other hand, participants in the

many laboratory experiments still discounted the future even though the future payoff was

ensured by the experimenters; among the studies of time preference that utilized the choice

battery, some people always chose the smaller and immediate reward even when researchers

guaranteed the greater and delayed rewards (Chapman and Weber, 2006).

The second potential explanation for patience comes from the philosophical debate. Ac-

cording to Loewenstein, Read and Baumeister (2003), there are two views of personal iden-

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tity: simple and complex. The simple view is that there is an irreducible entity of ”I” that

remains unchanged over time; an individual has no reason to discount the future self. The

complex view argues that the personal identity across time is based on reducible charac-

teristics (Parfit, 1984). One may forget previous experiences while the cells on one’s body

are continuously renewed; therefore, people discount the future event because the future-self

and the current-self are different. The value of the discount factor is therefore decided by an

individual’s subjective future-self connectedness. (Bartels and Rips, 2010) conduct 5 surveys

to show that an individual’s future-self connectedness positively correlates to his personal

discounting factor.

Risk and future-self connectedness influence an individual’s patience through the limited

cognitive resource. In the two previous explanations, people must imagine and calculate the

future risk or future-self, each of which spends extra mental energy (Kruglanski et al., 2012).

Recent studies in neuroscience suggest that the choice of delayed reward is a deliberative

cognitive process: an individual automatically prefer immediate reward, but the conscious-

ness will control the impulse and compare the immediate reward with delayed one; McClure

et al. (2004, 2007) use fMRI to show that there are different neural systems value immediate

and delayed monetary reward. Therefore, although the future outcome provides the same

utility to the current one, an individual can receive an immediate reward after choosing the

nearer alternative but must expend extra energy to imagine the feeling of receiving future

rewards. For example, Hofmann et al. (2008) showed that an individual’s working memory

capacity influences their self-regulation behavior. 1 In short, one’s discounting of a distant

outcome, or, impatience, is used as a cognitive energy-saving tool.

Patience is widely explored in the field of economics and psychology. In economics,

patience is called intertemporal choice, and is usually formalized and measured as discounting

1This theory also helps to explain the hyperbolic discounting rate, which means that people discountmore between the two near events than the two distant ones. The reason behind this is that the differenceof energy expended on imagining two distant events is less than the difference of two near events.

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factor. Intertemporal choice refers to the calculation of payoffs occurring at different times

(Frederick, Loewenstein and O’donoghue, 2002). People invest in a resource because it is

expected to yield a stream of payoffs over a single time period or a delayed payoff that

is altogether greater than the payoff received from the single period alone. In psychology,

patience is defined as self-regulation or future-orientation, and numerous scale is established

to capture individual’s time preference (e.g. Strathman et al., 1994; Zimbardo and Boyd,

2008). Patience is widely considered to be both a personal characteristic and a skill (Hofmann

et al., 2008), which is pivotal in the determination of human behaviors such as drug use

(Kirby, Petry and Bickel, 1999), smoking (Hardisty et al., 2013), academic performance

(Funder, Block and Block, 1983), risk driving (Zimbardo, Keough and Boyd, 1997), and

weight control (Chabris et al., 2008).

Theoretically, patience also plays a crucial role in the function of democracy. In demo-

cratic theory, Mill (1861) and Diamond (1999) believed that when citizens are educated to

look beyond their immediate interests, they are likely to recognize the just demands of others

and to act and think on behalf of public interests. The concepts of civic community Putnam,

Leonardi and Nanetti (1994) and self-governing capabilities Ostrom (1997) are crucial to sus-

taining and deepen the democracy in the long run,but they cannot be formed without the

willingness of the people to spend their time and resources participating at the beginning of

democratization. Galston (1988) and Hoppe (2001) warned that democracy might fall into

a process of decivilization owing to elections. When people cannot see beyond the nearest

election, vote-seeking candidates have an incentive to align themselves with myopic policies.

In formal model and decision theory, the concept of patience in political science is usually

captured as the discounting factor, which is influenced by the economists (Samuelson, 1937;

Loewenstein and Elster, 1992; Wilson, 2011). In the classic works on cooperation and ne-

gotiation in the social choice dilemma, Taylor (1976), Axelrod (1981), and Acemoglu (2006)

argued that people with a larger discounting factor may jump out of the tragedy of the com-

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mons and reach Pareto-optimal outcomes, such as the emergence of state and public goods

provision, in addition to revolting against the dictator. People who discount the future less

can see and calculate the future benefit they will receive from a stable and democratic gov-

ernment; therefore, they are more willing to invest their time and resources to cooperate with

other players rather than defect. To summarize, patience influences how people think about

politics, how people engage in the political process, and how the democracy will evolve.

Despite its theoretical importance, few empirical studies have explored the relationship

between individual patience and political behaviors (Loewenstein and Elster, 1992, Chap-

ter 2). The keyword related to patience, including discounting factor, time horizon, in-

tertemporal choice, self-regulation, or myopia, appear nowhere in the Oxford Handbook of

Political Behavior (Dalton and Klingemann, 2007). Even though the discounting factor is

widely used in the models theorizing political behavior and preference (Wilson, 2011), the

nature and the content of the discounting factor remains largely unexplored, not to mention

the empirical examination of its relationship to political behavior. 2

One exception, to my knowledge, is Fowler and Kam (2006)’s study on the relationship

between patience and turnout rate. The article is titled ”patience as political virtue,” because

the time cost in the Election Day for showing up is immediate, but the policy reward may

not be realized in the near future. Therefore, patient voters who discount the future policy

outcome less are much likely to go out and vote. Fowler and Kam analyze responses from

235 undergraduate students taking an introductory political science course in California and

reveals that patience provides a significant impact on turnout, controlling for civic duty,

2Previous studies on economic voting and democratic accountability usually assume or reveal that votersare, in general, myopic. But the word ”myopic” is used for describing the phenomenon that voters tended torespond to recent economic change rather than the economic performance a few years ago (see Lewis-Beckand Paldam (2000) for a review). However, this viewpoint is challenged by a recent study (e.g. Bechteland Hainmueller, 2011; Hellwig and Marinova, 2015; Wlezien, 2015). The goal of this article is to test theself-interest motivation coming from the future behind the sociotropic voting. Voters can (bayesian) updatedtheir perception on the national and personal economy either based on recent or past experience, but theythen use this information to evaluate the incumbent and expect for possible future trickle-down effect.Besides, most of these studies are based on macro-level data and underestimate individual-level differences.

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political interest, church attendance, and sociodemographic backgrounds. 3

Patience and self-interested sociotropic voting

This article intends to provide one more theoretical linkage between patience and political

behavior along with empirical falsification. The influence of the national economy on personal

welfare is, in general, indirect and not immediate. For the majority of the people, a slight

increase on unemployment rate or the gradual decline in GDP growth may not have an

immediate impact on their income or employment status. Therefore, if self-interest is the

main motivation behind sociotropic voting, this individual motivation is moderated by how

much he or she discounts the outcome of the future event. Patient people may perceive

the future negative impact on their pocketbook owing to the current decline of the national

economy, and vice versa. For impatient people, however, considering the future outcome

from the national economy is a cognitive energy-consuming process. They instead tend to

focus more on the immediate pocketbook records.

Meanwhile, altruism is the social preference of other-regardingness. An individual eval-

uates the incumbent by the national economy because she wants other people in the society

to live better (Simon, 1995; Edlin, Gelman and Kaplan, 2007). In this scenario, patience

may also moderate the altruistic utility: if an individual’s utility function is built on the

utility of the others, then the long-term influence from the current national economic change

may also render long-term impact on other people.4 However, I assume that the moderation

effect of the patience on self-interest motivation would be stronger than the effect on altru-

3Another exception is Healy and Malhotra (2009)’s study on natural disaster policy and vote choice. Theyfound that voters support the incumbent who spent more on disaster relief spending rather than prevention,which is later is much economically efficient. This article is different from theirs in two aspects. First, theirstudy is county-level (And meanwhile, as is described by the authors, most of the spending are made toindividuals.). Second, the difference between prevention and relief is calculated by the authors rather thanthe voters. Therefore, voter may change their behavior once they subjectively perceived the difference.

4I really appreciate the reviewer for the helpful comment on linking patience and altruism.

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ism. Following the law of diminishing marginal utility, since the altruistic sociotropic voters

believe that other people have immediate gain thanks to the improved national economy, the

marginal utility for the gain coming in the future is relatively low. In contrast, in the eye

of the self-interested sociotropic voters, they are comparing zero or negative gain now and

some positive gains in the future; thus, they would perceive higher marginal utility gain.

Besides, if altruism is the main mechanism behind sociotropic voting, we would expect to

see sociotropic voter to have more pro-social behavior or other-regardingness attitude, both

of which can be empirically verified.

How about the impatient voters? In my theory, impatient voters may also be sociotropic

owing to altruism. But when people discount the future a lot and focus merely on immediate

personal interest, it would be rational for them to reward or punish the incumbent basing on

their pocketbook record right before the Election Day. In this scenario, the impatient voter

would behave closer to the definition of rational economic man.

To sum up, if patience plays no role in the economic voting, it implies that voters care

less about the possible trickle-down effect from the current national economic change. Thus,

we can be more confident that it is the altruism that contributes to this sociotropic behavior.

In contrast, if patient voters are much more sensitive to the national economic condition,

then it is much likely that both the self-interest and altruism drive the sociotropic voting. In

addition, if the impatient voters are more sensitive to the pocketbook record, it implies that

self-interest may play an even more important role in explaining economic voting. Patience

may not confirm the existence of self-interested sociotropic voting, but it can serve as the

bridge of rationality that makes the self-interest factor possible.

H1: Patient people tend to be sociotropic voter.

H2: Impatient people tend to be pocketbook voter.

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Sociotropic voting is defined as that the perceived national economic condition signif-

icantly influence a voter’s support for the incumbent, while pocketbook is from perceived

change in family income. Therefore, H1 and H2 can be operationalized by using interaction

term in the regression model. The regression model would be like:

V oteIncumbent = β0 + β1 × NationalEco + β2 × PersonalEco + β3 × Patience + β4 ×

NationalEco× Patience+ β5 × PersonalEco× Patience+ controls+ ε

According to H1 , both β1 and β4 should be positive, indicating that people in average

are sociotropic voters, but patient people rely more on the perceived national economy

on evaluating the incumbent. When people perceived that the national economy goes well,

patient people are much likely to vote incumbent; if an individual perceived the decline of the

national economy, patient people blame the incumbent much severely. If only β1 is significant

but not β4, it implies the rational foundation behind the self-interest sociotropic voting is

less supported, and the altruism may be much important. In addition, β5 can examine

the hypothesis H2: if self-interest is the driving force behind economic voting, impatient

voters would be highly motivated to evaluate incumbent by the change pocketbook before

the Election Day.

Needless to say, personal and national economic condition are not the only influential

factors on individual vote choice. Based on the Eurobarometer data from 1976 to 1992,

(Kayser and Wlezien, 2011) find out that economic voting is contingent on the pattern of

partisanship. When an individual does not identify himself with any specific party, he may

rely more on the perceived economic condition while making vote choice. Therefore, in

the regression model, the party identification should be controlled. Moreover, Kayser and

Wlezien’s result suggest that H1 and H2 would find stronger supportive evidence among the

non-partisan voters. Thus I would analyze the result on both full and non-partisan samples

respectively. Other controls including gender, race, educational level, and family income are

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also included in the regression model.

Analysis

Data and measures

The empirical analysis on the individual patience and sociotropic voting is based on

2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. In the module, 1000 respondents were

asked about their level of patience (discussed later), perceived national and family economic

condition, vote choice in 2012 and in 2014, party identification, and socio-demographic back-

ground. The analysis is done by R 3.1.3, and the logit models are estimated by the glm

function.

In 2014 CCES, two items are used to measure individual patience. The description and

option of the two items are as followed: ”Imagining you will receive a certain amount of

money. Which of the following way do you prefer? (A) To gain $10 today (B) To gain

$20 six months year later” and ”(A) To gain $1000 today (B) To gain $2000 a year later.”

The design of the items is similar to the discounting rate choice battery (DR hereafter)

in economics (Frederick, Loewenstein and O’donoghue, 2002; Hardisty et al., 2013). Those

who prefer delayed and larger rewards are assumed to have more patience and higher self-

control, and those who choose immediate but smaller rewards are believed to be myopic and

emotional (Berns, Laibson and Loewenstein, 2007; Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999). The more

items are asked, the more precisely the researcher is able to estimate the discounting rate for

an individual participant. Recent studies show that the measure of patience based on this

design has been found with good test-retest stability (Kirby, 2009), and the measurement

positively correlates with other scales measuring self-regulation and future-orientation cre-

ated by psychologists (Daly, Harmon and Delaney, 2009; Vischer et al., 2013). In political

science, 20 items are designed in DR battery used by Fowler and Kam (2006), which fixes

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the immediate payment to be $100 in 30 days, and delayed payment in 60 days from $ 100.17

to $123.07. In comparison, only two items are allowed to put in the 2014 CCES. As a result,

it would be imprecise to calculate the exact discounting rate for each respondent.

In this article, I simply assume those who choose the immediate but smaller reward on

both items to be impatient (Patience = 0), and those who choose both delayed and larger

rewards are patient (Patience = 1). In the 2014 CCES, 393 (39.3%) are coded as impatient

while 375 (37.5 %) are patient. This distribution suggests enough variance for further anal-

ysis, and people are not choose at random. 5 Besides, measuring patience by using two or

less DR item is not uncommon, albeit not perfect (e.g. Klochko and Ordeshook, 2005; Wang,

Rieger and Hens, 2016). Moreover, to suggest the credibility of the two-item DR measure, I

can examine whether the measure has similar properties with previous studies. In the 2014

CCES, consistent with previous studies, being patient positively correlates with educational

level (Duckworth and Seligman, 2005) (r = 0.28, p < 0.01), family income (Harrison, Lau

and Williams, 2002) (r = 0.28, p < 0.01), regulating CO2 emission (r = 0.07, p = 0.05), and

not correlates with age (Chao et al., 2009) (r = 0.02, p = 0.51). Therefore, in this article,

I will use the binary coding on individual patience derived from the two items in the 2014

CCES.

The main dependent variable, V oteIncumbent, takes the value of 1 if the respondent

voted for the incumbent Democratic party and 0 if not, following the political context.

Besides, I also use the favorability ratings of the Democratic president for validity check

(2= very favorable to -2 = very unfavorable). In the CCES 2014, respondents were asked

to recall their vote choice in the 2012 Presidential election, to self-report the preference

among candidates in the 2014 Gubernatorial election, and to evaluate how much they favor

5It is also possible to calculate the range of discounting rate basing on the two items. There are 54 (5.4%)respondents who chose delayed reward in the first item (with smaller reward) but immediate one in the lateritem (with larger reward), and 178 (17.8%) with opposite choice. The main result and conclusion are notchanged with different coding.

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Barack Obama at that moment. All of the three items have pros and cons on examining

the patience-sociotropic voting linkage. For the vote choice in 2012 presidential election,

the president is widely believed to be responsible for the national economy, but the 2014

CCES was conducted two years after the election. Even though Kirby (2009) shows that an

individual’s level of patience has at least one-year stability, whether the assumption holds for

more than two years is not without question. Moreover, it is possible that people’s perceived

economic condition had changed. For the 2014 election, the survey was conducted right

before the Election Day (from October 1 to November 3). Even though the candidates in

midterm election, say governors, should not be directly responsible for the national economy,

previous studies still suggest that national economy or presidential approvals are important

factors shaping the vote choice in the midterm election(Chubb, 1988; Cohen, 2007). For

the favorability item, it is possible that people dislike the incumbent because he did a bad

job. However, the relationship between favorability and vote choice might not be linear.

After all, the topic of interest is vote choice. Given the limitations, the three measures cover

some aspects of how an individual evaluates and rewards the incumbent, and can be used to

examine the relationship between patience and sociotropic voting. Therefore, I will use the

three items respectively as the dependent variable in regression models. Future work can be

done with better measures such as survey in the year having a presidential election.

The two major independent variables, perceived national and personal economic condi-

tions, are defined as followed. In the 2014 CCES, perceived national economy (NationalEco)

is measured and coded from the item ”Would you say that OVER THE PAST YEAR the

nation’s economy has ...? 2 = Gotten much better (4.6%)6, 1 = Gotten better (22.8%), 0

= Stayed about the same (36.4%), -1 = Gotten worse (23.6%), -2 = Gotten much worse

(9.0%).” The perceived personal economy (PersonalEco) is defined by the item ”Over the

6In the parenthesis is the distribution of CCES respondents, while 3.6% reported not sure or skip thenational economy item. All of the subject answered the personal income item.

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Past FOUR YEARS, has your households annual income...? 2 = Increased a lot (4.9%), 1 =

Increased somewhat (25.6%), 0 = Stayed about the same (37.3%), -1 = Decreased somewhat

(20.4%), -2 = Decreased a lot (11.7%).”

Results: full samples

Table 1 illustrates the relationship between patience and economic voting in the 2012

and 2014 election. In all six models, consistent with previous studies, the perceived change

of the national economy strongly shaped vote choice in both the 2012 presidential and 2014

gubernatorial elections, and also the favorability of the president in 2014. Moreover, the

interaction between patience and perceived national economy positively influence the vote

choice in both elections, even controlling for socio-demographics and party identification.

Both the partial coefficient of NationalEco and NationalEco × Patience are positively

different from zero in five of the six models, indicating H1 received empirical support: patient

voters are much sensitive to the national economic change. 7 Meanwhile, the perceived

personal economic change has no effect on the vote choice, but renders some positive effect

on the favorability. The difference alludes that the personal gain may make the incumbent

much favorable, but it did not transfer to vote choice directly. That is the weakness of

using favorability as is discussed before. Besides, the interaction between patience and the

personal economy is negative among all models, but none of them reach a significant level,

which implies that H2 is not supported.

Figure 1 illustrates the moderation effect of patience on the sociotropic voting. The

two lines in each cell indicate the predicted probabilities to vote for the incumbent party or

favorability to the President, controlling all other variables in model 2, 4, and 6 in Table 1 at

the mean, while the shadowed area is the plus and minus one standard error. Overall, both

7The positive interaction effect between patience and perceived national economic condition in model 2and 4 remain strong even when the interaction between educational level and perceived national economy isadded in the model.

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Table 1: Patience and Economic Voting in the 2012 and 2014 Election

Dependent variable:

Vote Dem P in 2012 Vote Dem G in 2014 Dem Favorable 2014

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

NationalEco 0.846∗∗∗ 0.495∗∗∗ 0.529∗∗∗ 0.290∗∗ 0.772∗∗∗ 0.519∗∗∗

(0.127) (0.157) (0.120) (0.135) (0.074) (0.064)PersonalEco 0.141 0.242 0.072 0.096 0.138∗ 0.193∗∗∗

(0.115) (0.148) (0.115) (0.130) (0.073) (0.061)Patience −0.199 0.289 −0.253 −0.028 −0.364∗∗∗ −0.034

(0.176) (0.239) (0.179) (0.215) (0.107) (0.098)NationalEco × Patience 0.695∗∗∗ 0.720∗∗∗ 0.419∗∗ 0.389∗ 0.211∗ 0.099

(0.229) (0.273) (0.204) (0.227) (0.114) (0.096)PersonalEco × Patience −0.263 −0.339 −0.090 −0.122 −0.110 −0.086

(0.177) (0.222) (0.175) (0.198) (0.110) (0.091)Control Age, Male, Edu, Yes Yes YesIncome, Race, and PID

Observations 745 670 745 670 627 564Adjusted R2 0.318 0.574Log Likelihood −414.426 −273.849 −417.238 −336.463Akaike Inf. Crit. 840.852 573.698 846.475 698.927

Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01

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patient and impatient voters use national economy to evaluate the incumbent, which is shown

as the positive slope in both lines. Compared to the impatient counterpart, however, patient

people are much sensitive to the national economic change; they reward the incumbent

more when the perceived time is good, and punish the incumbent much harshly when the

perceived time is bad. Since the interaction between patience and perceived national economy

is positive, it indicates that people take the possible future outcome seriously. I suggest the

behavioral difference between patient and impatient voters on sociotropic voting is partially

owing to the self-interest consideration as is discussed earlier. However, even among the

impatient voters, sociotropic voting still exist. Therefore, empirical evidence from 2014

CCES does not rule out the possible influence of altruism on explaining the sociotropic

voting, but rather suggest that the moderation effect of patience can be seen as the rational

foundation for the self-interest motivation.

Figure 1: Voters with higher level of patience are much sensitive to the national economicchange on evaluating the incumbent

Results: non-partisan samples

Table 2 presents how the patience influences economic voting among the non-partisan

voters. In this table, H2, the interaction between impatience and pocketbook voting, receives

limited support on model 7 and 11. When Patience = 1, indicating patient non-partisans,

the net effect of perceived personal economy, which can be calculated by adding up the

estimated partial coefficients of PersonalEco and the PersonalEco×Patience, is indifferent

17

from zero in all six models. The results suggest that patient non-partisan voters are not

sensitive to the current pocketbook record (β2 + β5 = 0 in all six models, according to F-

test of multivariate linear hypothesis), while impatient voters to some extent tend to have

pocketbook voting (β2 + 0 × β5 > 0 in model 8 and 12).

Table 2: Patience and Economic Voting among Non-partisans in the 2012 and 2014 Election

Dependent variable:

Vote Dem P in 2012 Vote Dem G in 2014 Dem Favorable 2014

(7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)

NationalEco 0.774∗∗∗ 0.620∗∗∗ 0.319∗ 0.254 0.606∗∗∗ 0.586∗∗∗

(0.190) (0.210) (0.188) (0.201) (0.116) (0.117)PersonalEco 0.296 0.343∗ 0.173 0.240 0.194 0.223∗

(0.180) (0.199) (0.187) (0.197) (0.120) (0.119)Patience 0.136 0.382 0.320 0.279 −0.381∗∗ −0.115

(0.264) (0.308) (0.270) (0.305) (0.173) (0.185)NationalEco × Patience 0.663∗∗ 0.763∗∗ 0.425 0.591∗ 0.302∗ 0.208

(0.333) (0.367) (0.299) (0.334) (0.181) (0.181)PersonalEco × Patience −0.596∗∗ −0.445 −0.002 −0.122 −0.353∗∗ −0.177

(0.266) (0.295) (0.267) (0.295) (0.175) (0.176)Control Age, Male, Edu, Yes Yes YesIncome, Race, and PID

Observations 343 304 343 304 230 203Adjusted R2 0.262 0.373Log Likelihood −182.563 −156.658 −180.319 −159.465Akaike Inf. Crit. 377.126 335.315 372.637 340.930

Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01

The difference between the impatient and patient people on pocketbook voting is further

illustrated in Figure 2, which shows the predicted probability of non-partisans to vote for the

incumbent in the 2012 and 2014 election, as well as the favorability of the incumbent. The

predicted probability and value are based on model 8, 10, and 12. The shadowed area is plus

and minus one standard error. In this figure, patient non-partisans are indifferent on the

perceived personal economic change, while the impatient voters sensitively use pocketbook

18

record on evaluating the incumbent.

Figure 2: Non-partisan voters with higher level of patience are much sensitive to the personaleconomic change on evaluating the incumbent

Sociotropic Voting and Altruism? Preliminary Rebuttal

The alternative explanation behind the sociotropic voting is that the change of national

economy impacts on the welfare of other people, not on the respondent herself. If the al-

truistic concern is the main mechanism behind sociotropic voting, we should expect that so-

ciotropic voters would have more pro-social attitude and behavior. Unfortunately, there is no

direct measure of altruism in the CCES dataset, so I provide some preliminary examination

on the sociotropic voting and some behavior and attitudes linking to other-regardingness.

At the beginning, I simply recoded a respondent as a ”sociotropic voter” in 2012/2014

if she either (1) voted the incumbent in 2012 and 2014 and perceived the national economy

is better, or (2) voted against the incumbent in 2012 and 2014 and perceived the national

economy is worse. If the voter did not in this category, she is coded as a non-sociotropic

voter. In the CCES 2014, 79.0% (485 in 614) are recoded as a sociotropic voter based on

their vote choice in 2012, and 67.8% (416 in 614) in 2014, respectively.

The first test is its correlation to the blood donation. Blood donation is widely considered

as an altruistic behavior, especially after the monetary incentive policy was canceled in

1975 (e.g. Alessandrini, 2007; Steele et al., 2008). Thankfully, respondents in the CCES

19

2014 dataset were also asked about their blood donation last year, which is the only both

behavioral and non-political question in the survey. In the survey, 13.9% of respondents

(119 in 854) had ever donated blood in the previous year.8 However, for those sociotropic

voters based on their 2014 vote choice, their blood donation rate is 12%, while among non-

sociotropic voters is 18.7%; chi-squared test is nearly significant (p = 0.057). Based on the

2012 vote choice, there is no difference between sociotropic and non-sociotropic voters on

their blood donation behavior (14.1% and 14.1%, respectively). By this standard, sociotropic

voters are not more likely to donate blood.

The second test turns back to the political issues. For the domestic issues, separating the

self-interested and altruistic motivation is not theoretically easy since the left-right ideology

defines the diverse meaning of fairness and worthiness between citizens. For example, a voter

who wants to cut government spending on social welfare may still love to help the poors

through charity. In contrast, the definition of self-interest may be clearer on international

issues. In the dataset, there are three binary questions asking respondents’ attitude toward

the military action to ”destroying a terrorist camp,” ”ensure oil supply,” and intervene the

region with genocide or civil war.” While the former two reasons are usually considered as the

self-interested motivation, the same motivation is less clear behind the last scenario (Drezner,

2008). 9 Table 3 shows the sociotopric and non-sociotropic voters’ attitude toward the three

goals. In this table, sociotropic voters are much likely to support (to some extent) self-

interested military action, and are less likely to support fully altruistic action like intervening

the genocide.

Admittedly, the evidence provided in Table 3 is indirect and not strong since the voters

may have different criteria evaluating domestic and international issues; she can be a altruis-

8According to the America’s Blood Center, the annual donation rate of the eligible donors in the U.S. isless than 10%. See http://www.americasblood.org/about-blood/facts-figures.aspx . Access Date: February14, 2017.

9Also see https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/blog/running-numbers/american-public-opinion-syria . Ac-cess: February 14, 2017.

20

Table 3: Sociotropic Voting and Attitude toward Military Actions

Destory terrorist camp Ensure oil supply Intervene the genocideSociotropic in 2012 65.9%∗ 19.2% 38.1%Non-Sociotropic in 2012 51.5%∗ 21.2% 43.4%

Sociotropic in 2014 67.1%∗ 21.4% 37.4%Non-Sociotropic in 2014 54.8%∗ 15.7% 42.8%

Note: ∗p<0.05

tic nationalist. However, these evidences suggest that sociotropic voters are at most with the

same level of altruism, or less, than the non-sociotropic counterparts. When an individual’s

level of patience is moderating the perceived national economic change on the vote choice,

it is much likely that the moderating effect comes from the consideration of future trickle

down effect.

Discussion

In the twelve models, the moderation effect of patience on the sociotropic voting is

mostly supported. When people are patient and discount the future less, their response to

the perceived of the national economy is stronger than impatient ones. I suggest that the

interaction effect comes mostly from the self-interest consideration behind the sociotropic

voting, even though the altruistic motivation cannot be neglected. Farsighted people would

take the future influence to their pocket from current economic change into consideration, so

they rationally emphasize the importance of national economy much. The limited evidence

on the relationship between impatience and pocketbook voting also suggests the self-interest

consideration behind the economic voting, at least among the non-partisans. Therefore,

the empirical data 2014 CCES suggests that patience is an important moderator who helps

bridge the rationality with the sociotropic voting in the U.S.

There are three possible explanations of why H2 is not strongly supported. First, the

21

measure of patience only includes two items, so the scale may fail to capture enough variance

on the level of patience. Second, even though a wider scale is used, it is possible that

people in the U.S. are, in general, patient enough. In this scenario, the effect of patience

on pocketbook voting may not be found in the U.S. samples. Third, as is discussed before,

all of the three dependent variables have their own limitations. These three problems can

be put into the future work with better data collection. Moreover, the second point may

be dealt with cross-country comparison, which preliminary analysis will be provided in the

conclusion part.

Conclusion, limitation, and future work

Previous studies on the economic voting found that people are sociotropic voters, but

researchers fail to distinguish between altruism and self-interest factor behind the sociotropic

behavior. This article suggests that individual patience can be seen as the foundation of

rationality behind the self-interest sociotropic voting, in which self-interested voter would be

more sociotropic if they consider the future influence from current national economic change.

Data from 2014 CCES shows that individual patience positively moderates the influence of

perceived national economy on voting for the incumbent.

Patience or discounting factor, however, is the first step on linking self-interest and

sociotropic voting. The discounting factor is an instrumental variable, or a coefficient, but

not the outcome itself. Self-interest individual should first discount the future less, and he

or she has to imagine to future of the national economy. In this article, I ignore the inclusion

of perspective voting in the regression model owing to both theoretical and measurement

concerns. The measure of perspective voting is to ask respondents to imagine the future

of the national economy. But if the government is assumed to play the crucial role in

the national economy in the past, then the future expectation would be the combination

22

of the observation of the performance of incumbent and the expected probability that the

incumbent will be reelected. In other words, if an individual thinks the incumbent did well

in its current term, he or she votes for the incumbent because of the expectation that the

good performance will be continued in the future, which can be used to replace the measure

of prospective voting. In this scenario, self-interest sociotropic voting may be regarded as a

self-fulfilling prophecy. However, the expected future economic change should also include

other external factors like the change of global economy or military threat. That is why I

only call the patience as the rational foundation since at least one more step is needed to

build the causal mechanism.

Admittedly, the result in this article has a hard time to reconcile with previous findings

linking cognitive capability and economic voting (Gomez and Wilson, 2001, 2006). Gomez

and his colleagues find that sophisticated voters are much likely to follow their pocketbook

record. My response to the difference with their works is three-fold. First, this article

suggests the future exploration of how the cognitive resource is used. In the CCES 2014,

the correlation between individual patience and self-report knowledge level is not high (r =

0.184, n = 821, p < 0.001), and in Fowler and Kam (2006)’s study there is no correlation

between patience and political information (r = 0.03, n = 350p = 0.71). Second, there is no

theoretical linkage that sophisticated voters should emphasize more on the potential future

outcome. It can be possible that they discount the future more just because they have

figured out how the politics is working. Third, the measure and usage of political knowledge

scale are strongly criticized (Lupia, 2015). For instance, why does a voter who knows the

chair of the Supreme Court can also know the process of the trickle-down economy? Lupia

suggests that clearer theory is needed to link each item in the political knowledge scale to

the target of interest.

In the macro-level, if patience makes voters sociotropic and impatience makes one pock-

etbook, the level of patience among the electorates in a country will influence the linkage

23

strategies proposed by the parties and candidates, so as to the policy outcome of the gov-

ernment. In the scenario that the majority of the voters are myopic, the incumbent will be

reelected only if it can benefit enough voters within one term. One of the easiest methods for

vote-seeking candidates to reach this goal is through vote-buying and clientelistic patronage

(Scott, 1969; Magaloni, 2006); long-term economic reform is not welcomed by both voters

and politicians. If the majority of the voters are far-sighted enough, the incumbent would

be encouraged to propose painful and long-term economic reform, as is suggested by Stokes

(1996). In the long run, the country with longer patience would have better performance on

the national economy and programmatic linkage.

Limited evidence on the patience of the electorates, economic performance, and party

linkage is provided in Figure 3 and 4. Data of level of patience among people in different

countries is from Wang, Rieger and Hens (2016). Participants are undergraduate students

from the department of economics, finance, and business administration in the 45 countries

(n = 5530). The measure of the economic performance is GDP per capita in 2008, the year

before Wang’s paper being published. GDP data is from the Work Bank 10. And the measure

of party strategy is created by Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project (DALP

hereafter). DALP conducted a survey on 1400 experts in 88 countries in 2008-2009 and

created a clientelistic effort scale of a country ranging from 4 to 20 (Kitschelt, 2012). Figure

3 shows that is a significantly positive correlation between the two discounting factors δ and

β and GDP per capita, with Pearson’s r = 0.43, p < 0.01, n = 37 and r = 0.45, p < 0.01, n =

37. 11 Figure 4 presents that the negative correlations between clientelistic effort and the two

discounting factors, with Pearson’s r = −0.29, p = 0.08, n = 35 and r = −0.30, p = 0.07, n =

10http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?page=1. Search date: September 1, 2015.11Wang, Rieger and Hens (2016) measure the patience by two matching questions: (1) $ 100 now = $ ( ) in

one year from now. (2) $100 now and $( ) in 10 years from now. Participant’s subjective time preference canbe estimated by two parameters, δ and β in the hyperbolic discounting model. β is the level of present-bias,and δ is the traditional long-term discount factor, both of which represents the personal level of patience.To be specific, δ = (Q1

Q2)1/9, and β = 100

δQ1.

24

35, respectively. There is a suggestive pattern between patience, economic performance, and

clientelism.

Figure 3: Patience and Economic Development, Country-Level

Figure 4: Patience and Clientelistic Linkage Strategy, Country-Level

However, since cross-country data on patience is only one-shot, it is impossible to make

a causal inference based on available data. Moreover, the relationship between patience and

economic development may be theoretically dual-directional. Patience makes people future-

oriented and sociotropic, and the reward of the improved national economy - increase in

the pocketbook for the long-term - would, in turn, increase the patience of the individuals.

25

Nevertheless, the combination of the individual- and country-level results may help explain

that why voters around the world ”emphasize different indicators at different times”(Lewis-

Beck and Paldam, 2000).

If the relation between patience and sociotropic voting can be formed as a positive feed-

back loop, the loop can be the double-edged sword, which accelerates both the civilization

and decivilization process. For example, if there is an external shock to the loop undermining

the patience among people, such as natural disaster Li et al. (2011), terrorism, or political

scandal, people reflects their time preference through election: less sociotropic voting, more

pocketbook ones. The winner then will exert policies according to the public impatience,

which again undermines the patience of the public, as is warned by Hoppe (2001). Would

the election make people myopic? Would the self-enforcing democracy collapse owing to the

decline of public patience? More interesting research questions can be raised and empiri-

cally examined, if political scientists no longer treat discounting factor as a constant, but an

important personal characteristic which is malleable, interacting with the political context,

and predictive to political behaviors.

26

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